Cocotte has it in the bag

Philip Fine, Special to the Gazette04.09.2011

Owner Patric Meunier works at Cocotte Equipement, a small Plateau-based manufacturer of messenger bags in Montreal. the one-strap durable bags have been popular for many years with bike couriers and have gone mainstream in the last few years.

The owner of Cocotte Equipement, the name behind the messenger bags carried by more and more bike and bus riders around town, knows that if his made-in-Montreal product were reproduced, it would not stand up to the pounding his company’s flagship product has taken.

The single-strap Cocotte messenger bags have been road-tested by most of Montreal’s bike messengers, many of whom own the company’s Alfredo model and are still using the same bag after years of heavy use and all manner of weather conditions.

The company’s most popular model, a compact version of the Alfredo called the Fred, is sleeker and lighter and accounts for 75 per cent of sales. It has helped take the company beyond the limited clientele it first served. Cocotte now manufactures about 3,000 bags a year out of a small workshop in the Plateau Mont Royal borough.

The company began in 1993 as a part-time venture for Meunier’s wife, Jasmine Lachance, a costume designer who made bags for some messenger friends. The wide, flat bags, which swing around quickly and sport a quick-release adjustment and an optional sternum strap to stabilize the contents, caught on with the 200-odd couriers careering around downtown Montreal and dissatisfied with traditional backpacks. She made sales to several courier companies.

Lachance began to design specialty bags, security vests, and snowboard and tree-planting pants. For the first five years, she and Meunier lived and worked out of their Plateau workshop.

Meunier, who had been helping out the whole time, left his photography work and took over the business in 1998 from Lachance, whom he says was getting fed up with the long hours and little pay. She has since worked for the Cirque du Soleil and runs the costume department at CEGEP Édouard-Montpetit.

It’s ironic that the year Lachance quit was the same year the business caught a break. A hip pouch they were making became a popular seller at a Victoriaville shop. It ended up selling hundreds of units for the next couple of years.

In 2000, Cocotte introduced the Fred, the scaled-down messenger bag. The company also decided to divest itself of its other products and concentrate on bags, which are less dependent on high retail markups and changing fashion tastes.

Six years ago, the company launched an online site, which accounts for a good part of its sales. “It’s about the equivalent of one of our good retail stores,” Meunier said. Three years ago, one of Montreal’s biggest outdoor equipment retailers, La Cordée, reversed its initial hesitancy and became convinced the bags with an urban vibe could sell to a wider public. “They didn’t want to miss the boat,” said Meunier, with some satisfaction.

The company, named after a French term of endearment and slang for “pine cone,” went from a niche industry supplier to serving a more diverse population.

From 2000-2010, Cocotte’s sales increased tenfold.

With that kind of exposure for the bags, other actors have tried to copy the product.

One multinational luggage company came out with an Alfredo-like bag a few years ago that retailed in local stores for $50 less than his $150 item. But the Chinese-manufactured product used cheaper materials.

“It would probably have fallen apart after two weeks of being used by a bike courier,” Meunier said.

In the era of new product reviews for various communities, including those of bike messengers, and with discerning shoppers talking online about their likes and dislikes, the ersatz Alfredo never caught fire and was eventually discontinued.

The Cocotte owner says his advantage lies in a low profit margin and increasingly high rate of efficiency, which has allowed him to keep his products at the same price for the past decade. Compare that to the high shipping costs, requisite high volumes and difficult quality control of working with offshore manufacturers, and any savings on the low foreign labour costs would be negligible, according to Meunier.

He believes the only way for his competitors to put out a similar product at a lower price would be to skimp on materials. “Good material costs a lot all over the world,” the Sherbrooke-born Meunier said. He and his three employees cut, sew, assemble and ship bags out of the workshop that would never be confused with a high-tech manufacturing plant.

Meunier, 44, estimates he has manufactured 30,000 bags since the business began: “There’s not one bag that I have not touched.”

The bags are sold in nine stores in the Montreal area including the one that first agreed to sell them, ABC Cycles on Parc Ave, and another 10 in the rest of the province. The bag also sells in four boutiques in Europe and one in the United States. The bag had most recently been worn by a “typical” Canadian at the country’s pavilion at the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai.

While the bags have made the jump to students, techies and other urbanites, you can still catch a quick flash of their pine-cone logo from a passing Montreal bike courier.